Apiary Studio
[exhibit sign copy]
Right of Way
The ditches and embankments along our roadsides form a green through- way unbound by state lines that unites remnant land across the country. Imagine you’ve pulled over on the shoulder of a highway during a cross country road trip. What potential do you see for restoring habitat, adding beauty, and enhancing a sense of place
[EMT Guide Gleanings]
PHS Show Notes
Apiary Studio | “Right of Way” [Landscape] | Hans Hesselein | 3rd Year in Show
Exhibitor Description and Intent
Our exhibit, Right of Way, celebrates highway roadsides as a unifying American experience. Shoulders, embankments and ditches as encountered when pulling over on a roadtrip are in a sense a garden without a gardener, and the plants therein form a throughway unbound by state lines. Roadside flowers unite the remnant wild and public lands across the country.
We are utilizing a fun combination of common roadside wildflowers as well as cultivated ornamental plants that will evoke them. Our exhibit features a billboard with a large format photographic installation by Philadelphia-based artist Jaime Alvarez that will be debuted the show. The billboard serves as the backdrop of the garden and is suggestive of a mirage. Additional emblematic highway features such as a guardrail, asphalt curb, and reflective linework reinforce the feeling of pulling over on the side of the road. The planting itself is designed to evoke a shift in time from early spring dormancy to the height of summer profusion, and will be enhanced with some playful found objects.
Apiary Studio is a design-build landscape architecture practice based in Philadelphia. We are beyond excited to be exhibiting at the Philadelphia Flower Show for our third year in a row. Our company was founded in 2015 on the two pillars of experimental horticulture and craft-construction, which we try to apply in new and evolving ways to every one of our garden projects.
About the Exhibitor
Apiary Studio is a landscape architecture, design/build, and experimental horticulture firm. They work to achieve thoughtful design solutions that maximize opportunities and mitigate challenges in an increasingly post-wilderness, post-humanist world. By way of citizen research, in-house trialling, and playful curiosity, they have come to specialize in unorthodox building materials and conventions, adaptive reuse of urban decay, and unusual hardy plants to create gardens and outdoor spaces that are dynamic, responsive, and break from the mold. Collaboration with socially and environmentally minded colleagues, clients, and constituents is the underpinning of their practice, from private to public sites, wherein it's their belief that we are all ultimately stakeholders in landscape.